orn in 1953, Robert Charles Wilson published his first story in 1974. He is well known for his skillfully characterized, hugely inventive and eloquently written SF novels, starting with A Hidden Place (1986), and proceeding from strength to strength with Memory Wire (1987), Gypsies (1989), The Divide (1990), A Bridge of Years (1991), The Harvest (1992), Mysterium (1994), Darwinia (1998), Bios (1999), The Chronoliths (2001), Blind Lake (2003) and, in April 2005, Spin, the compelling story of a near-future Earth accelerated billions of years forward in time. His only, but quite remarkable, short fiction collection is The Perseids (2000). With his gift for filtering the most radical conceivable global and cosmic upheavals through a sympathetic and intimate human lens, Wilson is one of the most persuasive and topically pertinent SF authors at work today.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Robert Charles Wilson by e-mail in March/April of 2005.
Although originally from the USA, you've lived in Canada for decades. What do you see as the defining characteristics of Canadian SF, as opposed to the American and British versions of the genre?
Wilson: I've been asked this before, and I don't really have a solid answer. If I stand back and squint ... well, it's obvious there's been a considerable surge in Canadian SF and fantasy over the past three decades. But the Canadians are a wildly heterogeneous group of writers. You can draw a line connecting, say, Peter Watts and William Gibson, but it hardly intersects with Rob Sawyer or Michelle West.
It's also tempting to say something political here. Science fiction, whatever the persuasion of its individual authors, has always been a blue-state phenomenon—urban, broadly progressive, religiously skeptical. It thrives alongside liberalism and what used to be called "free thinking," and it will always be viewed with suspicion by dogmatists and conservatives. It is H.G. Wells in one of our founding works, The Time Machine, who says, "You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted." Such as the idea that human history is divinely ordained or that the human species is fixed and immutable.
This kind of thinking doesn't go down too well at Focus on the Family or the Heritage Foundation, and the occasional quasi-SF that emerges from that contingent—say, Tim LaHaye or Newt Gingrich—is laughable.
I don't want to make too much of this, however. Most of the same political dynamics operate in Canada (or Britain, or Australia). The trendlines veer differently, but I expect those dynamics flavor all of our writing, consciously or unconsciously.
It's been commented that your novels, in their mixing of high-concept hard SF and complex, sympathetic human characterization, very fecundly combine the traditional virtues of idea-oriented genre fiction and character-oriented literary fiction—not that those categories are in any way absolute or mutually exclusive, of course. What, then, have been your major creative influences?
Wilson: I like to say that SF isn't about ideas, it's about imaginatively inhabiting ideas. So of course I like the big-idea people—that whole Stapledon-Clarke tradition that's unique to our genre. But I'm also drawn by the writers who can vividly inhabit their vision of the future, either through detail and extrapolation, like Heinlein, or through a deeply engaging sense of the personal, like Bradbury or Sturgeon. (Sturgeon's "The Other Celia" is in its way as perfect a science-fiction story as The Time Machine.)
When it comes to mainstream reading—and I'm looking at my bookshelves as I write—my tastes are all over the map. Lately I've been re-reading John Cheever: All those sunsets on the train to Shady Hill or Maple Dell, all that moody infidelity. Raymond Chandler, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly. David Leavitt for sheer grace, Steven Millhauser for imagination and style. And lots more. Whether you call these "influences" or not, I don't know. My first great literary romance—at the age of six or so—was with the classic children's writer Eleanor Estes.
Your novels typically revolve around a Big Idea—in your recent books in particular, these have been staggering: the displacement of continents, an entire new context for biological evolution, giant monuments materializing from the near future, a temporal barrier beyond which, in mere years, eons pass. Other SF writers must envy you this command of gigantic Concept; without quite asking the cliched question "where do you get your ideas," can I inquire how you generate these astonishing cosmic conceits?
Wilson: Notice that none of these ideas are, in the traditional SF sense, extrapolations. I don't expect the events depicted in Chronoliths or Darwinia to come to pass. But they aren't just fantasy premises. They're tickets to an exploration of more comprehensive ideas of human contingency and mutability. This is what Wells contributed to the genre: Unlike the inventions of Jules Verne, Wells' time machine is an unlikely and probably impossible device. But it takes you somewhere real: into a particularized personal experience of the revealed truths of geology and evolution.
"Human contingency and mutability" indeed: In virtually all of your work, there's a profound sense of the fragility of our everyday reality—alternate probabilities intrude, the future comes knocking, our assumed centrality in the universe is undermined. In other words, you tend to write disaster novels. Why this emphasis in your fiction? Can disaster be benign, transforming?
Wilson: I don't really think of them as disaster novels, but yeah, "a sense of the fragility of our everyday reality," I'll go along with that. Of course, we're all living at the brink of a vast abyss of time and space. It doesn't feel that way because we've evolved to exist in a local, largely social universe. We communicate, we cooperate, we live in complex communities, our brains expend a lot of energy simply encoding and deciphering human faces and expressions. And that part of life is wonderful, invaluable, indispensable. But the universe beats on beyond it, inconceivably ancient and complex. SF is a way of saying, "This, too."
And "This too" may sweep us all away. Your characters are often ordinary people thrust into extraordinary, world-threatening crises; they survive through gritty determination—or not. Are you fundamentally optimistic about the ability of human beings to weather any cataclysm, including, perhaps, global warming?
Wilson: In all honesty, I think it's an open question. And it depends on what you mean by "survive." If we're reduced by environmental disaster to another stone age, is that survival in any but the most literal sense?
And again, there are questions of scale. Will we as a species survive the next couple of centuries? Almost certainly, but equally certainly, under vastly changed circumstances. (Whether better or worse.) Will we survive on a geological time scale? The odds are less good, but who knows? And on the cosmic scale? Sorry, but on the cosmic scale everything is finite.
My most optimistic expectation is not that we'll survive unchanged as a species but that we'll produce a legacy, that there will be some kind of intellectual and cultural continuity between what we are now and what we become (or what we create to replace ourselves).
Moving on to your novels of the last decade or so: True to your agenda of throwing consensus reality into doubt, Mysterium features an alternate world dominated by Gnostics—Christian heretics who assumed our imperfect world was a spurious, subordinate Creation, not properly the work of God at all. Historically, do you think it a good thing that Gnosticism in fact lost out to regular Orthodoxy and Catholicism?
Wilson: It boils down to contingency, a word I used above. The simplest and most enduring SF themes are all about human contingency—cultural, temporal, biological, cosmic. The point is not that an institutionalized Gnosticism would be better or worse than what we ended up with; the point is that things could easily have been different. Far from being vehicles of timeless truth, religious institutions are better considered as fossil evidence of cultural conflicts won or lost. Christianity was created less by the teachings of Jesus than by the turf wars and doctrinal battles of Roman bishops, which often balanced on a very narrow fulcrum—the famous "scintilla of difference" that divided Arianism from orthodoxy, for instance.
Darwinia also presents a disconcerting alternate-history scenario—before World War I can happen, Europe vanishes, replaced with an exotic landscape; yet all is not as it seems. ... Apart from Darwinia's cosmological implications, is there a judgment here on the morality of World War I? And an irony, that Europe, then the "civilized," colonizing continent, becomes the wilderness, to be explored and colonized?
Wilson: Darwinia is silent on the morality of World War I, but it does begin at the point where America began to surpass Europe as a cultural and economic presence. The irony is deliberate, but the conception of the novel began with a much less sophisticated thought—what if the exploration of the temperate world hadn't ended in America; literally, what if there had been an unexplored, uninhabited wilderness for 20th-century America to explore and colonize beyond its own continental borders?
Your next novel, Bios, is, as its title implies, about biology—specifically, alien biology that shows up the human race as an evolutionary aberration of sorts. How difficult was it—is it—to place humankind in such a disillusioning context, yet retain sympathy for your characters?
Wilson: Not "disillusioning" so much as decentralizing. Most profound scientific discoveries have that effect. We're naturally inclined to a kind of unspoken narrative in which humanity is the central figure, or at least occupies a uniquely privileged position. The scientific evidence always seems to be toppling us off that platform—no, we're not at the center of the solar system; no, the Earth was not especially created for us; no, we're not immune to the forces that have modified or driven extinct other species. Or, in Bios, no, our evolution is not the only path to consciousness—it may not even be the best way.
For some writers this perspective is profoundly alienating. (Thinking here of H.P. Lovecraft, whose esthetic reaction to the size and age of the universe was a kind of horrified repulsion.)
The Perseids, your only collection to date, is a powerful cycle of stories about intrusions by the Other and the chthonically strange into Toronto, where you live. Is Toronto really such a bizarre place? Or is it that the city is dull, and needs shaking up?
Wilson: In the story cycle that comprises The Perseids I was consciously attempting to adopt that Lovecraftian esthetic—the room is small, the light is dim, the night is dark and vast. (Less directly through Lovecraft than through the darker works of Fritz Leiber. Most of Lovecraft's stories are narrated, not dramatized. Leiber's horrors are more personal and immediate, and I like them more.)
But the trick is to put the familiar and cosmic in close proximity (Lovecraft's Providence, Leiber's San Francisco), and Toronto was what I was familiar with. Could have been any city. The important thing isn't the geography but the light coming through the transom at dusk, the streets full of hidden narratives.
The Chronoliths, published in August 2001, reads in retrospect like a dismayingly prescient analysis of the mentality of 21st-century terrorism—the destruction of landmarks, vast arrogant symbolism. But there's also much about the psychology of totalitarianism, about justified contemporary fears about the future—do you think new Stalins and Hitlers and Maos are just around the corner?
Wilson: I don't know about "just around the corner," but the human capacity for creating or elevating such people surely hasn't gone away. "It can't happen now" is as short-sighted a sentiment as "it can't happen here."
Blind Lake is an impressive study of humans studying aliens—anthropology via xenology, one could say. How did you put together this remarkable structure of observation, and what (as the observer) did you yourself conclude?
Wilson: Basically, I was riffing on the commonplace observation that you can't scientifically study something of which you have only one example. When it comes to a sentient symbol-generating species, there's no way to generalize. Until we come across another one. At which point all sorts of interesting questions become immediate and concrete. What does "intelligibility" really mean? How much of our behavior is broadly rational (i.e., communicable), and how much is an accident of evolution? Are some species actually saner than others, and if so, where on that spectrum do we stand?
I don't know the answer to these questions, but I suspect we're more comprehensible than we are forgivable.
Your latest novel, Spin, describes the imprisonment of Earth within a barrier or temporal gradient: For every year inside, a hundred million pass outside; within our conceivable lifetimes, the Sun becomes old and red. Is this, first and foremost, a device to enable ordinary people to witness and understand history on the scale of billions of years? The far future, made uniquely immediate?
Wilson: In the broadest sense, that's exactly what I had in mind.
The narrator of Spin is a medical doctor, Tyler Dupree—an average enough individual, who portrays himself in a warts-and-all manner. But at the center of his narrative are two extraordinary people, the siblings Jason and Diane Lawton—the one a scientific genius, rational and driven, the other perhaps equally gifted but intuitive, drawn to faith, and so excluded from larger decision-making. Do you see science and religion as necessarily thus opposed?
Wilson: I wouldn't say necessarily opposed. People of faith can be as flexible or as dogmatic as anyone else. My uncle Kenneth Wilson was a Christian minister and writer—he wrote Angel at Her Shoulder, a book about the Formosan missionary Lillian Dickson. I've spent my share of time in churches and synagogues. I know religion is more than a set of arbitrary assertions about the physical nature of the universe.
But the least interesting or useful thing we can do with religion is take it literally. The pedantic atheist pointing out obvious contradictions in the Bible or the Koran may be gauche—but he is, of course, right. I understand the appeal of faith; I understand the nature of grief and the longing for redemption. What I don't get is how a sane person can stand up and say, "Your belief in a six-armed blue deity is absurd, but my belief in a redeemer born to a virgin inseminated by an invisible god is both realistic and unquestionable." And yet just this sort of tribal literalism has often been and is now a potent political force and a serious obstacle to scientific literacy.
Any religious text is read selectively by its followers (because every religious text is rife with contradictions), and we ought to welcome any reading of a sacred text that encourages inclusivity, generosity, kindness. The Rev. Martin Luther King was never a threat to public education or sane political discourse. Alas, the same can't be said for some other contemporary religious leaders.
In the course of Spin, Mars is terraformed and colonized, on an intriguing accelerated scale; its ambassador to Earth, Wun Ngo Wen, presents interesting ideas regarding sustainable biospheres and responsible exploitation of Nature. Is Spin, ultimately, an ecological novel?
Wilson: I'm not sure I'd call it an ecological novel, but any speculation about the fate of humankind is bound to have a big ecological component. We're already facing problems to which the answers are going to be complex, difficult and sweeping.
Some of the chapters of Spin flash forward, to Tyler Dupree's eventual exile, along with Diane, in Indonesia, and ensuing events—as in The Chronoliths, there's a lot of compelling detail of life in Southeast Asia. Have you spent a lot of time in that region? And what's your reaction to the recent, actual, tsunami disaster there?
Wilson: I want to emphasize that the Indonesia depicted in Spin is an extrapolation in line with the events of the novel, not a contemporary tour guide. No, I haven't spent a lot of time in the region, but I did try to get the details right. I don't want to write the kind of SF novel in which the rest of the planet exists as an afterthought—that kind of provincialism is contrary to the spirit of the genre, in my opinion.
My reaction to the tsunami was the same as everyone else's—send money to the Red Cross. Though I did keep checking the Internet to see whether the small west-coast port of Padang had been badly affected. (Apparently it wasn't.)
What are your upcoming projects? Further novels, more short fiction ... ?
Wilson: I have a longish story in Lou Anders' forthcoming FutureShocks, called "The Cartesian Theater." I contributed to the most recent run of short-shorts for Nature magazine. I have an essay in Glen Yeffeth's War of the Worlds: Fresh Perspectives on the H.G. Wells Classic (Benbella, May '05).
And I'm doing something I've never done before: I'm writing a sequel. While Spin is a complete stand-alone novel in itself, the situation in place at the end of the book—I don't want to be more specific—was too intriguing to leave alone. The sequel is called Axis, and if I get ambitious there might be a third volume.
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